As part of the current exhibition at Para Site, Sven Augustijnen’s Spectres (2011) and Anson Mak’sOne Way Street on a Turntable (2007) explore issues of class and the projection of colonial shadows into our days, from Belgian Congo to Hong Kong. Spectres looks closely at the murder of the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo Patrice Lumumba, a key moment in the early post-colonial history of Africa. One Way Street on a Turntable traces the establishment and development of the first private estate in Hong Kong, Mei Foo Estate, through several intertwined personal histories.

Golden Heights Estate is a fictional yet perfectly plausible place, an aspirational real estate project in Hong Kong complete with a prescribed and normative lifestyle. The exhibition using this title is a modest investigation into the new landscape of desires carved by the emerging global middle class. As one of the main consequences of globalization’s social restructuring of the world, the consuming middle class has embraced a homogenous culture of desires, fetishes, aspirations and values across different geographies within the ’emerging’ world. The middle class, as the narrator of this shared global lexicon of signs and goods, is a crucial keeper of the ideological backbone of the globalized economy. The exhibition observes these realities and contemplates whether there is any class solidarity imaginable in this situation and if so, what could it lead to.

Golden Heights Estate runs through April 20, 2014.

2:00-2:15 pm Introduction

2:15–3.30 pm One Way Street on a Turntable by Anson Mak (Cantonese and English, 74 mins.)